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AMSTUD 150:Introduction to English II: American Literature and Culture to 1855 (ENGLISH 11B)

(Formerly
English 23/123). A survey of early American writings, including sermons, poetry, captivity and slave narratives, essays, autobiography, and fiction, from the colonial era to the eve of the Civil War.

AMSTUD 150A:Colonial and Revolutionary America (HISTORY 150A)

(Same as
HISTORY 50A. History majors and others taking 5 units, register for
HISTORY 150A.) Survey of the origins of American society and polity in the 17th and 18th centuries. Topics: the migration of Europeans and Africans and the impact on native populations; the emergence of racial slavery and of regional, provincial, Protestant cultures; and the political origins and constitutional consequences of the American Revolution.

AMSTUD 152C:The JFK Era and American Literature

Few U.S. presidents have exerted so great a fascination on the national¿and global¿post-World War II imagination as John F. Kennedy. As the 2013¿s semi-centennial anniversary of Kennedy¿s assassination attests, the production of films, television and multimedia programs, biographies, conspiracy theories, academic studies, and literary texts about the iconic JFK and his fabled, thousand-day presidency continues unabated. In this course, we will explore the attention Kennedy has drawn from writers and filmmakers in texts by Norman Mailer, Don DeLillo, Mario Vargas Llosa, and others.

Last offered: Autumn 2014
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II

AMSTUD 152K:Mixed-Race Politics and Culture (AFRICAAM 226, CSRE 152K)

Today, almost one-third of Americans identify with a racial/ethnic minority group, and more than 9 million Americans identify with multiple races. What are the implications of such diversity for American politics and culture? This course approaches issues of race from an interdisciplinary perspective, employing research in the social sciences and humanities to assess how race shapes perceptions of identity as well as political behavior in 21st-century U.S. Issues surrounding the role of multiculturalism, immigration, acculturation, racial representation, and racial prejudice in American society. Topics include the political and social formation of race; racial representation in the media, arts, and popular culture; the rise and decline of the "one-drop rule" and its effect on political and cultural attachments; the politicization of census categories and the rise of the multiracial movement.

Last offered: Spring 2015
| UG Reqs: GER:DB-Hum, WAY-A-II, WAY-ED

AMSTUD 154:American Intellectual and Cultural History to the Civil War (HISTORY 154)

(Same as
HISTORY 54. History majors and others taking 5 units, register for 154.) How Americans considered problems such as slavery, imperialism, and sectionalism. Topics include: the political legacies of revolution; biological ideas of race; the Second Great Awakening; science before Darwin; reform movements and utopianism; the rise of abolitionism and proslavery thought; phrenology and theories of human sexuality; and varieties of feminism. Sources include texts and images.

A painting of men charging across a field, a photograph of dead bodies in a ditch, a fragment of metal, a sliver of bone, and a brass button: how do we make sense of the visual record of the American Civil War (1861-65)? From the Capitol Dome to a skeleton dug up in a highway project a hundred years after the last battle, the course will consider the strange and scattered remnants of a famous era. Drawing on the poetry of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and Herman Melville, the paintings of Winslow Homer, the photographs of Alexander Gardner, and the oratory of Abraham Lincoln, the course will examine what cannot be portrayed: the trauma of war.

The course will focus on American abstract painting from the 1930s to the 1960s, emphasizing the works of art at the Anderson Collection at Stanford. We will focus on looking closely at pictures by Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, and other renowned abstract painters, developing skills of speaking and writing about these works of art. We will also place these pictures in their mid-20th century context: World War II and the Cold War; Hollywood and popular culture generally; Beat literature; and locations such as New York and San Francisco.

This course concentrates on many important American photographers, from the era of daguerreotypes to near the end of the pre-digital era. We study photographs of the Civil War, western exploration, artistic subjects, urban and rural poverty, skyscrapers, crime, fashion, national parks, and social protest, among other topics. Among the photographers we study: Carleton Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Garry Winogrand, and Diane Arbus. Emphasis on developing students' abilities to discuss and write about photography; to see it.

Last offered: Spring 2014
| UG Reqs: GER:EC-AmerCul, WAY-A-II

AMSTUD 178:Ethnicity and Dissent in United States Art and Literature (ARTHIST 178, ARTHIST 378)

The role of the visual arts of the U.S. in the construction and contesting of racial, class, and gender hierarchies. Focus is on artists and writers from the 18th century to 1990s. How power, domination, and resistance work historically. Topics include: minstrelsy and the invention of race; mass culture and postmodernity; hegemony and language; memory and desire; and the borderlands.

AMSTUD 183:Re- Imagining American Borders (CSRE 183, FEMGEN 183)

How novelists, filmmakers, and poets perceive racial, ethnic, gender, sexual orientation, and class borders in the context of a current volatile national discussion about the place of Americans both here and in the world. How Anna Deavere Smith, Sherman Alexie, Shailja Patel or Ta-Nehisi Coates consider redrawing such lines so that center and margin, or self and other, do not remain fixed and divided. How linguistic borderlines within multilingual literature by Caribbean, Arab, and Asian Americans function. Can Anzaldúa's 1986 conception of borderlands be constructed through the matrix of language, dreams, music, and cultural memories in these recent American narratives? Course includes creatively examining one's own identity.